It's possible that they keep selling them because the issue was silently fixed with a hardware or firmware revision. And of course they don't reply because they know anything they say will be used against them in a lawsuit. These days with the short attention spans of people it's more intelligent to do nothing but wait until things blow over.
Maybe a stupid question, but is there a follow-up/replacement to the product they are turning off, and why didn't they contact their customers and propose free replacement? Would be such an easy way to completely avoid this customer relations nightmare.
I'm eternally grateful every time I can complain to the seller, and hold them liable for the product for at least 2 years here in Europe. I once tried getting in contact with a major manufacturer about a broken device, and they did absolutely everything to make my life hard and draw the dispute out, even when I had video evidence of the failure. I just gave up at the end. So yes, the seller has to be held liable, and if the product is bad for business, the seller will not want to carry the products. If sellers stop buying unreliable, hard to update devices/vulnerable devices, maybe it will make enough of a dent on the bottom line.
They'd rather defend a lawsuit and pay a settlement than preemptively replace all defective products as they come in. Companies make this sort of decision all the time--trading off users for the bottom line. There's nothing evil about it (no point in doing more than what the law requires of you), but if your policy is to do what you can get away with under the law, you should expect litigation over whether you've crossed the line in any given case.
Thing is, they still continue using the code even as they are complaining. Which is to say, they'd very much like the warranty so long as it's also free, but if it's not, they're willing to go without.
The reporting here implies that devices for customers who don't accept the new terms may "cease to function". Does the mechanism for how that happens matter? The bottom line is that either the product continues to provide whatever functionality it was purchased for, or it's now broken.
Typically under consumer protection laws in places like Europe, a product that ceases to work properly unreasonably quickly after it is purchased will trigger certain rights for the purchaser, such as getting the device repaired or replaced so it works again, or getting a full or partial refund as compensation.
Importantly, there is typically no exception to this principle just because the product in question involves software or depends on remote services. In fact, the EU strengthened consumer protections on digital purchases not so long ago, so the direction of the legal currents is very clear.
I suppose you could say there has been some sort of informal understanding that because it's so hard to write software with no bugs or security flaws, it's reasonable for the suppliers of products with software components to supply software updates post-sale to keep things working properly without falling foul of the basic "it no longer works" trap if users don't then apply those updates. But the sorts of shenanigans we've seen recently with software developers bundling unrelated and possibly unwanted changes in with their bug fixes and security patches are stretching good faith here, and at some point I suspect something has got to give.
The same principle applies to products with dependencies on remote services that don't necessarily last as long as the product itself, whether that's a server for a multiplayer game, or a DRM scheme with remote authorisation, or a provider of audio data that makes a speaker system useful.
Yeah, it's not like they had any hardware defects like broken keyboards, power management issues, blank watch screens, recalled batteries, weirdly places antennas, etc... Oh wait they just ignore those until the problem gets large enough they get into news and need to start honouring the warranties.
A warranty is never voided if nobody knows what you did.
The profit margins are quite thin on consumer equipment; they can't afford to investigate into the chassis, having someone look at every chip that might have been tampered with.
The strange part is that they're discussing a warranty at all. Legally these are still their cards, if they find out you have one they can demand it back without offering any compensation whatsoever, not just not fix it for you for free.
almost spot on. the caveat you cite - that you have to demonstrate it's a fault in manufacturing - is how they try to get away without replacing the device.
however, to cover all bases, within the first six months of device life it's the manufacturer that has to prove the fault was not caused from a manufacturing defect.
Hardware manufacturers could pressure Microsoft to stop doing this. I hope there will soon be legal action prompting the manufacturers to take action (perhaps a class action against Dell by people who have been denied warranty on this basis? - though in the USA at least, Dell probably has that blocked by arbitration clauses.)
Personally, I first go online to see whether I can find a solution or more info about a problem, but I think that is an approach typical for the more technically inclined types. 'run of the mill' consumers, I think, will directly call the shop where tey bought stuff. I do not think they will call whoever made the phone, if only because they often do not know how to do that.
Yes, there are cases where one can register a product with the producer and get a guarantee that way, but even then, EU law is clear: the buck stops at whoever sold you the device.
So, even then, I would be inclined to contact the seller earlier than the producer because, in the end, if you buy form Q, Q is the only one who has an obligation to help you. In this case, If I were to buy from Google, and things didn't work as expected, I would contact Google. They cannot hide behind "but we bought it from X". If they could, consumers would typically get no support at all. For example, X would say "it looks like the battery is the problem. That is not ours; we bought it from Y"; Y would say "I don't know. Maybe it's the controller chip? Z made that"; Z would say "we outsourced the software for that chip" or "no, it's not the chip, it must be the chemicals in the battery/the device getting too hot due to incorrect firmware in some other CPU", etc.
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